There's only one version of Zarch, in two releases...the original and the Play It Again Sam release.

The "musical" effect is down to it relying on the WaveSynth, Percussion and StringLib Modules being in the same order they were in Arthur. I've posted the fix on here somewhere, or look at the ADFFS boot script.

EDIT: Here's the post, you need to swap the order of Percussion and StringLib

Last edited by sirbod on Sat Feb 11, 2017 6:50 am, edited 2 times in total.

I thought there was an updated version created when they upgraded the ARM processor in the Arhcimedes? I'm sure it was because the original version glitched or ran too fast on the new hardware. Is this true? I'm sure I read this somewhere

Zarchos wrote:I also believe there's a wizzard who recently enhanced Zarch but he's too humble to say it

Pleased tell me about this! I am completely obsessed with this game. I find it strange there are no proper gameplay videos on Youtube. People will just be trying it out but no one will be playing very far into the game. I spoke to a guy on here who said he got to Wave 27 back when it was released. I want to see what techniques people use and learn from them.

Looks freaking amazing! Very strange for me because I was wondering last night if anyone would ever attempt to enhance and optimise Zarch - and today I found out they have. How many fps' does it run at on an A3010? Seriously thinking about buying an Archie again now.

RichP wrote:Looks freaking amazing! Very strange for me because I was wondering last night if anyone would ever attempt to enhance and optimise Zarch - and today I found out they have. How many fps' does it run at on an A3010? Seriously thinking about buying an Archie again now.

I'm sure you've also read the thread to overclock the A3010 to 26 Mhz ... and the videos on YT ...

RichP wrote:I thought there was an updated version created when they upgraded the ARM processor in the Archimedes? I'm sure it was because the original version glitched or ran too fast on the new hardware. Is this true?

Not true I'm afraid, only two versions were released. The original and the Play It Again Sam, which was identical code wise, but didn't include the loader and its disc protection.

RichP wrote:Looks freaking amazing! Very strange for me because I was wondering last night if anyone would ever attempt to enhance and optimise Zarch - and today I found out they have. How many fps' does it run at on an A3010? Seriously thinking about buying an Archie again now.

I've yet to implement any of the proposed optimizations, I'm still working on getting the original game stable enough to drop additional code in. It runs at 4 fps on an 8MHz and needs ~66MHz to run at 25 fps. This will improve once optimized as the new line fill is nearly 3 times quicker than the original.

I was planning on posting a video over the weekend on the JASPP YouTube channel, so spent a fair bit on time on it this past week to get it stable enough to demo. I didn't get a chance to record it though, as my son wasn't well.

sirbod wrote:I've yet to implement any of the proposed optimizations, I'm still working on getting the original game stable enough to drop additional code in. It runs at 4 fps on an 8MHz and needs ~66MHz to run at 25 fps. This will improve once optimized as the new line fill is nearly 3 times quicker than the original.

I was planning on posting a video over the weekend on the JASPP YouTube channel, so spent a fair bit on time on it this past week to get it stable enough to demo. I didn't get a chance to record it though, as my son wasn't well.

Thanks for the info on Zarch versions. Just watching the new video you posted showing the projects progress. Looks superb at the moment! Thank you for all your hard work and also to everyone who assisted along the way. Please keep going with the optimisations to get it running at 25fps on original Archimedes CPU or even 12Mhz CPU. Getting it running on a base model is the holy grail. If you set up a donations page I will definitely contribute. I know how hard it can be to finish projects like this.